Monthly Archives: February 2012

My favorite women’s basketball team fell hard today in the first round of the playoffs.

Becky, hot sweaty and no makeup after the game, with her beautiful mom.

Losing the game today is part of sports and does nothing to diminish all she has accomplished. Becky is still amazing and is my hero. Her mom, our daughter was instrumental into her growing into the person she is. Her mom is amazing herself and we are so proud of her as well. Those two are very close.

Becky and her younger brother spent a lot of time with us and usually got along so well, but there were times I thought they might kill maim one another. Today I have my youngest grandchildren and they are busy fighting arguing over the iPad. History repeats.

Usually I am careful not to include any personal information, but today I have such good news to share.

You can hop over to my Totally Random Shez to read the entire post or just click on this link to meet my beautiful granddaughter Becky. I am so proud of her. She is a beautiful young woman. She is the hardest working person I know and has earned every award that comes her way. She is also sweet, funny, kind and I LOVE her!! Tons.

I feel the same way about my other grandkids, they just are not grown up yet. They will be way before I am ready.

Things continue to be hectic, but I have managed to get in some art time nearly every day. This weekend I was the last in the family to succumb to the nasty virus that came home from school with our kindergartener and passed to brother, daddy, grandpa and just when I thought I had escaped…

I spent the weekend down as much as possible and mostly lounging in the living room in front of the fire with my laptop handy and my Bamboo tablet in my lap. Another full-page was completed, so being down for the count is not all bad. I cropped out a chunk of the page and am sharing it here with you.

Here Comes the Bride

This is Amanda. As you can tell, she is a very sweet girl. The book is in 32 page format and the first and end page are glued to the cover leaving 30 pages for: decorations aka the “end papers” which are complete; the title page is complete; the info page, mostly only needs the official ISBN; of the remaining 25, 18 are completed, and the most difficult ones I tackled first.

If I could be sick again over the weekend I could make really good progress, but then we are left with a house that needs cleaning and laundry a la mode, AGAIN. Tonight I have split my time between dinner, blogs, illustration, sweeping, and have half the laundry done…and..tomorrow is another day.

Looking at this portion today, it looks like the shadow is too aggressive, so it may not be done yet. My next book will not have such complex and detailed pictures. This book started out in watercolors. I had an editor tell me it was “old fashion” and all they were looking for was “purple dinosaurs.” Not sure why I listened to her because the next editor said she “love the pictures, but it would conflict with a book they already had in the works.” Why didn’t I listen to editor number two? Not sure.

Maybe because I wanted to learn to illustrate on my computer. I never expected it to take me 40 hours (or more) per page. A water-color takes a day. But I love the consistency of the colors, if I could get past being too detailed it would have been done, but when “detailitise” strikes it becomes impossible to know when it IS DONE. Digital art means you can make changes until the cows come home, but it will always need just one more tiny detail fixed.

It was handy to have my laptop and my tablet with me on the long days in the hospital and the never-ending ones while mom was in hospice, both times. She was sleeping so much of the time but was so comforted when she was awake that I was there. Mom was also pleased to know I was working, it was important to her that I finish.